From Nuremberg to Eichmann

we wanted to thank st. John's for co-sponsoring this evenings program and we have a lovely reception waiting for you afterwards and we hope you'll join us for some of our other programs they're ongoing and continuing we'll be having two Hannah Arendt programs with Bard College and so take a look at all of the upcoming programs and we hope to see you back here again so without further ado John Barrett good evening thank you so much Alisa and your colleagues all of you - who are connected to this very powerful vital institution this is an incredibly important teaching legacy and historical legacy that the Museum of Jewish heritage embraces and carries forward and we're all a part of it and it really matters and and you're showing your understanding of that by being here tonight I'd also like to thank st. John's students alums colleagues my Dean who are here they already know but others of you may not that st. John's opened its law school in 1925 after New York City Jews many of them immigrants had approached the Vincentian priests of st. John's College in Brooklyn and asked for another law school a law school to give them opportunities for legal education in a city where too many doors were closed to those would-be Jewish law students st. John's is also the alma mater of Nuremberg prosecutor Mary met Leigh Coffman which is a small set if you unpack what I just said Nuremberg prosecutor woman Jew 1930s law graduate I'd also like to acknowledge and thank representatives if you will who are here I'm sure I hope that some who are Holocaust survivors are here that's been my experience every time I've been in the audience or spoken at a program here and what each of them stands for and carries forward in their living and in their teaching really matters and at a personal level individual I'd like to acknowledge is my friend Jerry day know who's a lawyer here in New York whose father Joseph Dana was a prosecutor on the staff of Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg trial in 1945 my topic tonight is Nuremberg - Eichmann - put some dates on it that is 1945 1949 the bracketed period of Nuremberg trials - 1961 the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and of course this program and a lot of the fabulous programming that Alisa has generally pointed you to but you should see the details is connected to the exhibit upstairs operation finale and I encourage you to see it and see it more than once before it departs in December I also encourage you to study more about the Eichmann case and about the Holocaust and Nuremberg and law and human rights I regard this and I think you're already with me as a human responsibility to learn and teach these topics and I hope that it contributes to better futures including a world that continues to rise from depths that were the 1930s in world war ii so here's my road map in the plan for what's ahead I'm going to lecture for 30 or so minutes and then we'll have a segment for Q&A and I'm going to cover six points first Nazi conduct and criminality and I won't belabor it secondly the Allied commitment to pursue accountability under law not just to use force militarily and violently to defeat these Nazi perpetrators and then to finish them off with summary executive actions or firing squads to be blunt but to pursue legal processes of accountability in the postwar years third the specifics of the 1945 path that got the Allies from Germany's surrender in May to Nuremberg that fall and fourth the 1945 1946 international Nuremberg trial my fifth part will be the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings the twelve American trials that occurred between 1946 and 1949 in Nuremberg so the total set of Nuremberg trials is 13 cases and finally my sixth we'll be connecting them into of course Israel's 1961 prosecution of Adolf Eichmann I'll have a few concluding words then about learning and commitment to justice and here let me just spoil it is the takeaway it's often said that the Holocaust crimes against Jews planned extermination was not prosecuted at Nuremberg and that victim testimony was not an important part of the Nuremberg trial there's some accuracy to that but in large measure it's incorrect it's incorrect in two ways first of course the Nuremberg generation and the Eichmann trial generation 15 years apart were the same people the same knowledge the same experiences the same priorities and they were all connected in the human way that is a generation and time which was that post-world War two ERA and you see it ironically in today's New York Times this had not been part of my planned remarks but of course it jumped off the page at me this morning there's a story about the role of Evo our friends uptown in the recovery of the Jewish Yiddish archives of Vilna priceless historical documents that were hidden for 70 plus years and still being discovered recently in the basement of a church and they were hidden by a Jewish team that the Nazis had conscripted to help preserve things that after the Jews were exterminated could be the exhibits in the museum's of the exterminated Jewish people that the Nazis planned to erect and of course members of the Jewish teams squirreled away and hid and preserved these documents even from the Nazis and now history is finding them one central member of that Jewish team hiding these documents in Vilna was the Yiddish poet Abraham sutskever the New York Times story however does not mention that such giver was a Nuremberg trial witness he wasn't just a Nazi prisoner he wasn't just a Jewish conscript in this horrible project with the papers he wasn't just a person whose family got exterminated by the Nazis including his baby before his eyes he was someone who took the witness stand and testified about that at the international Nuremberg trial in 1946 and then he made a Lea and became an Israeli he did not testify in the Eichmann case in 1961 but rest assured since he lived on into the 1990s that he was present and very attentive as all Israelis were and as the world was during the 1961 Eichmann trial so that's one level of the in correctness of separating Nuremberg from Eichmann but in the evidence in the actual trial proceedings these are all so deeply connected and it's a cascade of links the Allied victory made Nuremberg and other war crimes trials possible the Allied will and decision to pursue the rule of law rather than force and vengeance was a choice to take a trial path not a firing squad path all of what Nuremberg produced was a significant factor in the international community's support for the creation of the State of Israel that all was a necessary predicate for the capture and the trial of Adolf Eichmann and in that courtroom in Jerusalem both evidence and personnel were literally from Nuremberg and were the systemic continuities between Nuremberg and the Eichmann case so perhaps this goes too far my ultimate claim is that it's fair to think of the Eichmann trial as the 14th Nuremberg trial now let me turn to the substance of the talk and begin with the slides part 1 Nazi conduct and criminality of course begins with him and this is in Nuremberg at one of the Nuremberg Party rallies September of 1934 this is Dachau which was created in the spring of 1933 just two months after Hitler came to power and under the emergency decree became the Chancellor of total power and DAC how the first concentration camp was no secret from the world it was a confinement facility for political enemies of the Reich widely advertised bragged about open to the REDCROSS tout it is a new way to control anti-social elements and in its original phase not a place of much killing or torture yes confinement yes suffering yes uncomfortable and illness producing conditions but in 1933 it was a prison more or less of a political enemies type and on display for the world this is a Nuremberg Party rally in its public grandeur and support this is a Zeppelin field in the background is the Fuhrer Tribune from which Hitler speaks and you get a sense of popular support excitement indeed patriotism that's connected to this Nazi rise this is a eugenicist chart that embodies the madness of the nuremberg laws promulgated by the rubber stamp Reichstag which met at the Nuremberg Party rally in 1935 and defining who is a Jew which basically was a three grandparent rule if the Nazis if the Nazis determined that one had three Jewish grandparents not how your grandparents identified themselves not how you identified yourself how the Nazis identified you these laws stripped you of German citizenship barred you from various professions deprived you of property pushed you towards empower impoverished conditions in emigration and caused enormous suffering that's 1935 and this is 1939 of course they look a little dinky and harmless by our military standards but these are real tanks and these are tanks crossing the German border into Poland on September 1 1939 and this is the real shooting war after the conquests that had been less violent in the earlier years the angelus Bohemia Moravia etc and so this war goes east and of course goes west and goes to the Soviet Union and goes through Belgium through France goes to the English Channel nearly goes across to London this is the Warsaw Ghetto in a very famous photo of a boy whose name we'll never know this photo is found in an album created by a Nazi underling for his boss to celebrate the conquest of Poland and this boy undoubtedly perished in conditions that we can only imagine so the Holocaust in one human face perhaps is this photo which is part of the evidence at Nuremberg later when that album is captured and discovered and used as part of the proof now part 3 part 2 the Allied commitment to pursue accountability under law this is of course President Roosevelt and radio microphones it's a fireside chat from October 1942 seventy-five years ago this month when President Roosevelt announced to the American people what had already been governmental II announced both in Britain and in the United States that evidence was being gathered by an international process they called it the United Nations but it was not yet the UN entity it was the Alliance nations including the refugee governments that had taken base in London to gather evidence and assembled dossiers on the criminality the atrocities the aggression the law breaking the treaty violation of the Nazi perpetrators of World War two why because after we defeat them we will arrange em and we will hold them accountable for what they're doing and Roosevelt's fireside chat of October 12 1942 is the first American public pronouncement actually quite a brave thing to say because at that moment his military forces were not yet on a beachhead anyplace we're not yet succeeding in the field but there there was a confidence if you will that was behind that by November of 1943 this is at Moscow the foreign ministers are meeting that's Molotov in the middle that's Anthony Eden that's Cordell Hull this is an agreement that is signed that further develops the commitment to have international accountability following the inevitable Allied victory and the path from there is of course bloody and prolonged in the military sense but consistent in the pronouncement sense that this is what we will do for example at Yalta in February of 1945 you see death coming soon on the etched face of Franklin Roosevelt the Yalta declaration reiterates this commitment to have an international accountability process and then if course Franklin Roosevelt is Gwon Harry wrote Harry Truman becomes the president in April of 1945 and Harry Truman has to deliver on that commitment and so part three is the 1945 path to Nuremberg it begins with Truman reaching out to recruit the man on the right Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson to head the American effort that's part of delivering on this international promise and the u.s. is really going first by staffing this commitment in a very high profile high talent way Jackson is generally regarded as the leading legal figure in the country a man with perhaps a political future that will end up in the oval office perhaps they'll be Chief Justice he's the best writer on the court he's been the best advocate before the court when he was Solicitor General he'd been a leader in the American Bar etcetera etc and he's all of 53 years old so in his prime Truman needs a great lawyer for a great challenge and he asked Jackson in April 1945 to take on this job Jackson was a Roosevelt man this is a fishing trip off the coast of Florida in the mid 1930s they dressed well when they fished in those days and he'd never know from the nonchalant grip here and smile that that paralyzed man needed that pole to remain upright and here's Jackson who at that point is an Assistant Attorney General of the United States Harold Ickes the Secretary of Interior Jesse Jones the Secretary of Commerce this is Jackson with Jim Landis on the cover of Newsweek in 1935 litigating a big constitutional battle the kind of Obama care litigation circa 1935 it was called the public utility Holding Company Act and of course Jackson won this is the Supreme Court that Jackson begins to argue before in the late 1930s it's still the court of the four horsemen Butler and McReynolds and Sutherland and Roberts its Chief Justice Hughes yes it is Cardozo and Brandeis and the first of the Roosevelt appointees Hugo black the court is beginning to turn and Robert Jackson the Solicitor General argues 40 some cases before the court wins almost all of them Jackson becomes Attorney General and then in 1941 appointed to the Supreme Court he's only 49 years old and he's never pursued politics he's never pursued international diplomacy he's never been anything other than a practicing lawyer but he's been a soup to nuts practicing lawyer and so as a talent set even four years later even having put on the robe and begun to make the justice Jackson reputation truman's reached for Jackson was the unanimous vote of everyone who he consulted Stimson the Secretary of War and his underlings and the Justice Department and etc etc and Jackson said yes this is Jackson on the day he's publicly unveiled as the American chief of counsel for the prosecution of axis war crimes may 2nd 1942 you'll notice in the interval between his recruitment in late April and early May Adolf Hitler gone Joseph Goebbels gone soon others gone the kind of arch criminals weren't all going to be available to be put in the dock but some were and now this was Jackson's project he begins consulting widely and preparing to go across the Atlantic to do this work and among the many facets of his consultation is close regular consultation with Jewish leaders this is a lawyer named Jacob Robinson who's a senior official of the World Jewish Congress a lawyer a brilliant man and a Jackson advisor they meet here in New York at the federal building on June 12th 1945 and Robinson with colleagues delivers evidence to Jackson of what the Nazis have done to the Jews Robinson tells Jackson that nearly 6 million Jews have been exterminated and Jackson is flabbergasted by the enormity of that number of course an inner-circle news consuming center of washington guy knew what the anti-semitism of the Nazis were knew what Dachau was knew what concentration camps were knew and military aggression was knew the suffering confinement and rumors of Horrors but the number is an amazingly mind-boggling thing of June of 1945 and Jackson says to Robinson what's the based on and Robinson says its equation basically the census data before the war plus ordinary demographics indicates there should be this many european jews and now the refugee data from displaced person camps show that there are only this many jews and the missing increment is the 5.7 million and jackson says that's a basis to investigate get to work everybody you know everybody we know the soldiers the intelligence community etc if this has been done this must be proven and become a centerpiece of the prosecution project but the number is not a basis to make the charge then jackson goes to london for the summer of 1945 this is an international negotiating process to harmonize four very different national legal systems the US and the UK are brothers in the common law if you will but civil code continental france and quasi civil code soviet legalism are at least three very different things and the allied agreement to do this together now is a complex thing to actually begin to work out and they meet and they argue and they meet and they argue through weeks and weeks at a house on the premises of westminster abbey called church house it's literally a four sided table with small delegations you see jackson here his deputy Wild Bill Donovan a War Department lawyer Murray Bernays and Jackson's own son William Jackson a 26 year old lawyer who served as his father's executive assistant for the entirety of the Nuremberg experience were the principal at the table American negotiators and here are their British friends and here are the French who are you know barely there a new and sort of fragmentary Republic's ending kind of accidental and unprepared and unadvised representatives and these are the problems this is the Soviet delegation they of course fully believe in a trial it should be an important step before we hang these criminals and that's the agreement as the Soviets regard it we have decided we will together punish these criminals in other words we have convicted them the fireside chat the Moscow declaration the Alton declaration etc Robert Jackson and the British say no no due process means a real prospect of acquittal that's what we're here for and this is an impasse that goes back and forth and back and forth for many weeks it ultimately is resolved in favor of due process ironically by the man on the right at Potsdam in late July of 1945 this is the new big three and poor Stalin must have looked you know he's looking for Churchill and Roosevelt and instead he's seeing Harry Truman and Clement Attlee but one of the topics they take up in Potsdam is what they will do to deliver on this and basically Truman articulates the Jackson due process vision and Stalin says okay which is communicated to London which very swiftly results in the London agreement of August 6 1945 this agreement creates the world's first International Criminal Court it's called the International Military Tribunal because it will function in a land of military occupation Germany has surrendered unconditionally there is no more Germany and it will have jurisdiction over for crimes conspiracy aggressive war making the commission of war crimes and the commission of crimes against humanity and it will function more or less by American Bill of Rights standards it will meet in public it will give the defendants the right to see the charges against them to obtain discovery to have counsel of choice to have compulsory process to call witnesses loose general admissible 'ti standards of evidence but generally a process where a defendant has a chance and isn't simply on a conveyor belt heading toward a gallows but this man is not in anybody's sights the proposed defendants who are being discussed publicly in the summer of 1945 are people of course who are available so no Hitler no Himmler no gurbles no Muller but others of senior position who function as representatives of organizations and corporate interests Hermann Goering Rudolf Hess Joachim von Ribbentrop Albert Speer Julius Streicher general keidel general Yodle Funke Frank the Nuremberg defendants of course who you know from history and Ernst Kaltenbrunner the head of the Reich main security office as a representative of the Gestapo he's not in fact the head of the Gestapo but Gestapo Mueller is missing and presumed dead so Colton Brunner is the person who is the functioning representative captured prisoner likely defendant for that sector of Nazi perpetration and of course this man Adolf Eichmann worked in the Jewish section in the Reich main security office under Hitler Himmler Mueller Colton Brunner and that's where we have Eichmann but the chain of supervision if you will that I've just sketched out should not give you any sense that this was a minor functionary this was a person who was kept in this office because he was zealously effective at his job and his job beginning in the late 1930s was each phase of solving the Jewish problem implementing the nuremberg laws forcing immigration and then beginning in 1941 by his testimony implementing the final solution which is the designed extermination system that's embodied in the total that is six million now none of that is fully or even remotely understood in the summer of 1945 but Jacob Robinson knows enough to write this letter to Robert Jackson in July of 1945 it's July 27 letter and here's the key paragraph the newspapers recently carried lists it was a great disappointment not to find in these lists the name of a man who is probably more directly responsible for the destruction of the Jews than any other single Nazi he is SS open Ober Fuhrer Adolf Eichmann also spelled Eichmann etcetera etc where's Eichmann why not Eichmann find Eichmann focus on Eichmann which is showing the Jewish community and Robinson and growing knowledge of what Eichmann was but of course Eichmann is nowhere to be found he's believed in fact to be dead the next month the Jackson team is getting more information from the US War Department this is a memo of August 1945 to Colonel Ayman who we'll talk about in a minute from Bernays who you saw in the photograph and it says the War Department will be sending a dossier about this fellow who was the head of section 4b he is this is the Jewish section of the Gestapo he had primary responsibility for the extermination and transportation of Jews they're beginning to know what he was and what he would represent if they could get their hands on him but of course they never do they make the turn from London and head to Nuremberg and this is the occupation map showing the different sectors Nuremberg is here in the blue American sector basically in the center that brings me to part for the International Nuremberg trial it chose nuremberg because it was the u.s. sector and because it had this largely intact courthouse and Weil and spoke prison complex the Palace of Justice after repairs had been made on the roof you see these four windows which are court room 600 the big courtroom where the Nuremberg trial occurred and you see the trucks and soldiers of US military occupation that are securing and provisioning this site the key pretrial function that connects to Eichmann and developing the proof of the Holocaust is the interrogation division in Jackson's staff there are many divisions there's a film division there is a documentation division this is the interrogation division which is interviewing prisoners to figure out who did what and it's headed by Colonel John Harlan Damon who you just saw on that memorandum he's a New York prosecutor in the 1930s into the early 1940s before military service he was a big-time Brooklyn prosecutor of Murder Inc so having fought the New York mob if you will he's crossed the ocean and he's now gonna prosecute the Nazi mob and this is most of his staff in the interrogation division Izu min because I want you to see Smyth Brookhart who's a name that historiography needs to do more by because he's an incredibly important successful vital interrogator in these october/november months when the Nuremberg trial is just about to start developing the witnesses who prove the Holocaust this is another photo Amon heart Margery Hackett a stenographer Richardson and Feldon an interpreter Rudolf Hess a prisoner heading toward being a Nuremberg defendant and again Amon and Brookhart what Brookhart does in November 1945 his interview and young man named dieter wisliceny visla seni was an underling of Eichmann in the Jewish section 4 B 4 of the Reich main Security office and visla seni tells the truth expansively from his memory without supporting documents he reports that Eichmann ran this system that he kept in his office in Berlin the central record of the extermination program that it was marked top secret and it was a fat file that he kept in a safe near his desk that once in what visla sunny remembered his 1942 visla sunny was a little concerned about learning that a large number of Slovak deportees had been exterminated when the Slovaks wanted to visit and make sure they were being maintained in this prison and Eichmann said we can't do that they're dead and vicious and he said how are they dead and Eichmann pulls out an order signed by Himmler and the order says that Hitler's direction now decrees that there be a final solution of the Jewish Question which miss listen he says is verbal euphemism for extermination the Fuhrer is charged signed by Himmler delivered to Eichmann being implemented by the Jewish section is to exterminate the Jews of Europe visla sunny remembered that this document had a red border now that's quite a vivid memory when Adolf Eichmann is confronted with this testimony in Jerusalem in 1961 Eichmann says yes yes yes but he's wrong about the year it had to be 1941 it couldn't have been as late as 42 it was 41 I remember so this Allah Sonny is authenticated in the end by Eichmann visla sunny with Brooke Hart's interrogation in the end puts us all in an affidavit which is part of the Nuremberg trial evidence by November the trial is ready to start the judges have been appointed the courtroom is ready this is jackson and the american prosecution table this is a part of the defendants box these are defense attorneys and this is one robert surveyed seus who i will return to who's representing for its alkyl one of the nuremberg defendants the judges are two from each of the four Allied powers a principal and an alternate but in the end no one became ill so no alternate needed to step up and they function as a court of eight and these are the prosecutors at the American table you see Jackson you see his son William Jackson you see Robert Kempner who's a german jew a little blurry but you see john amon of the interrogation division plus thomas dodd and sydney alderman and whitney harris and sam harris among the inner circle staff that was the american prosecution this is Jackson at the podium opening the trial on November 21 1945 perhaps the most brilliant courtroom speech in history and maybe take courtroom out of that perhaps one of the great orations in history it is a high-pitched visionary substantive evidence-based account of what the proof will be and in this opening statement Jackson says we will deliver proof of a systematic system to exterminate six million Jews in other words Robinson's mathematical concern worry fear assertion of June with work and documents and visla seni and affidavits is now something that Jackson's opening on in November of 1945 the trial goes forward against these defendants and this is a haunting picture you see Hermann Goering in the corner defendant number one and Hess and ribbon top and title etc this is rudolf hess standing this is a prison psychologist Gustav Goldberg Gilbert who met with the prisoners regularly and wrote a book and became kind of a confidante to them with their knowledge that he was an American soldier this is Ernst Kaltenbrunner who I mentioned the defendant who headed the Gestapo or at least was regarded that way was nearly the senior official in the right main Security office the ultimate boss over Eichmann who was in the dock and in this trial the evidence comes in to prove each count of the indictment the aggressive war-making the planning and conspiracy to do it the war crimes and the crimes against humanity and in particular the extermination is system that was designed and deployed to eradicate the Jews of Europe this is a witness Otto Ohlendorf who's called by the United States to testify in January of 1946 he too had been interrogated pretrial by both Amon and Brookhart he too had written an extensive affidavit which is introduced into evidence he's a head of one of the Einsatzgruppen killing teams commanding officer that did his job day to day with documentation exterminating captured people as the Nazi forces advanced to the east and Ohlendorf testifies in the trial about what the Einsatzgruppen was and how he reported to and was under the direction and supervision of the Jewish section and particularly Adolf Eichmann this is visla seni who on the stand repeats what he'd put in the affidavit and what he's said in the interrogations to Brookhart in gory meticulous unimpeachable excellent recall detail this is a third witness who accidentally falls into the witness stand because he wasn't captured until after the prosecution had rested his name is Rudolph hearse not to be confused with Rudolf Hess this is h OE SS hearse he'd been the Commandant of Auschwitz from 1942 to 1944 and he's hiding as a peasant farmer but he's captured and he's brought to Nuremberg and he's interrogated and notice is given by the British and the Americans to the defense attorneys that we now have hearse in custody kaltenbrunner's lawyer decides to put her on the stand why for a small point which might even be a true point that hearse had no recollection of ever seeing Kaltenbrunner in Auschwitz and then the attorney for some reason also introduced the affidavit which was the full account authenticated and sworn to by hearse of what Auschwitz had been and done and his total of extermination his number is between 2 and 2.5 million historians now regard that as too high kind of sickly it's a padded statistic but her says I got this from Adolf Eichmann because I was a part of reporting to the Jewish section and he said what this all added up to I wasn't the only commandant there was an Auschwitz period before me there was a brief period after me the total Eichmann said was 2.5 million here and a total of nearly 6 in the East this man and here you see him in his I daresay happier days at Auschwitz where he lived with his family is The Smoking Gun Holocaust evidence and the defense attorney having put this all in and opened the door of course makes it possible for Amon to do a lacerating cross-examination of Rudolf hearse in April in the defense case so the Holocaust in the Nuremberg trial is there the Nuremberg trial concludes in the summer of 1946 with judgments that find the validity of the crimes that find 18 of the 21 individuals live in the box by the end of the trial guilty that acquit 3 and of the 18 convicted decree 11 death sentences and seven sentences from life to lesser terms of years and at the end of that process Robert Jackson shown here with one of his principal deputies Telford tailor returns to the US Supreme Court what that Nuremberg trial the one and only Nuremberg trial left was a record a testimonial record a transcript record a documentary record of all of what Nazi as Nazism had been and because much of it was captured documents augmented by witnesses like Ohlendorf and visla seni it's an enormous Lee large and deeply powerful and uncontradicted Nuremberg record the nuremberg process goes forward not as an international endeavor but under taylor's leadership for 12 subsequent american trials they were sector cases and sort of next level of responsibility either not represented in the International trial or furthered so the medical case the doctors experimentation case the Milch case the Justice case which is the lawyers and prosecutors and judges the poll case the flick case the IG Farben case the hostage case the Reich main security office case the Einsatzgruppen case the Krupp case the Ministry's case and the High Command case plus a special one-man prosecution of general Otto Ohlendorf of those 12 cases different aspects touch on the work of the Jewish section and what Adolf Eichmann was but it is deeply believed by this point that he committed suicide in 1945 he's a ghost who did Horrors but he's not a living perpetrator to hold accountable had he been living he probably would have been a defendant either in the Reich main security office case or perhaps in a separate Jewish case which ultimately Telfer Taylor and the army supervision decided not to bring the evidence developed in these trials includes the Vance a conference memo which is minutes of the extermination esteem in January of 1942 attended by Eichmann to take notes he said oh yes he raised glasses and toasted afterwards too but he was really just listening as Heydrich and other leaders bureaucratically planned the final solution of the Jewish Question the Einsatzgruppen case prosecuted by our friend Ben Firenze who has lectured here in this museum and start on 60 minutes and is the living Nuremberg prosecutor the one and only and humanity's conscience is the biggest murder case in history because that's what Ohlendorf and the documents and the Einsatzgruppe and records showed had there been and Eichmann that mantle might well have applied to someone else but there was not something called a holocaust trial there was not a Jewish trial and then the cold war happened he was supposed to chuckle at my cold war slide Nuremberg was wrapped up and for a period of many years the world's attention turned to other pressing security issues as a superpower matter as a world war two's allies matter but of course part 5 there was Israel and there was Eichmann this is the New York Times headline May of 1960 reporting is that he's been found and pretty quickly the story of his kidnapping in Argentina and transportation to Israel is disclosed he's brought to trial in this courtroom he's in that box which is upstairs in the exhibit and this is an Israeli case brought by a state that did not exist at the time that Nazi Germany and Adolf Eichmann we're committing their crimes which is a rule of law question a complicated legal question it is a retroactive law passed by the state of Israel for crimes against the Jews that is the basis of the Eichmann prosecution it is a case prosecuted by Gideon Hausner the Attorney General of Israel by Gabriel Bach his deputy this is Robert Cervantes you last saw him in court room 600 when he was a younger man representing Fritz Southall and Nuremberg Adolf Eichmann asked for him as his defense attorney and Cervantes came to Jerusalem and with the resources of Israel paying him and a small staff of assistants did a credible job with frankly an impossible case Cervantes was in the regard of Taylor and Jackson and everybody who dealt with him a straightforward capable lawyer and none of his history showed that he'd ever been a Nazi so as professionalism he is an interesting case this is Cervantes then this is Cervantes in 1961 this is Jacob Robinson in 1961 who's gone from the Federal Building in June of 1945 to the memo of July of 1945 to Nuremberg during 1945 46 and lots of work in between for the World Jewish Congress to being in effect the fourth prosecutor at the Eichmann trial so Nuremberg veterans not just the defense attorney this is Gus Gilbert the psychologist who again time does this to each of us is a little older and fuller by 1961 and is called as a witness to testify in the Eichmann trial to testify to things that were told to him by people who are no longer available to be witnesses in 1961 because of their Nuremberg sentences having been carried out and so the hearsay accounts but uncontested and admitted by the court our descriptions of Eichmann's role according to Goering according to others who were not there to give it themselves this is an American judge michael moose mono from the pennsylvania supreme court who was one of the recruited American judges in a number of the subsequent Nuremberg trials the Einsatzgruppen trial the Farben trial the hostages case and justice moose mono again 15 years older is a witness in the Eichmann trial he's permitted to testify to his investigations and to the record of the trials in which he was a jurist at Nuremberg now why you might say not use the transcripts what's this with a judge testifying to what happened in the court well it turns out that even to this day not all of the millions and millions of pages of Nuremberg records are at a snap available and certainly they weren't in 1961 so Hausner and the prosecution says you know the unset' group and trial is published in a short form you actually saw it on the table here in front of BA this is the book of the published records of the unset scroop and trial but this is a sample of many many many transcripts that are lost in archives or warehouses and so much mono is permitted to testify as a summary witness to what the Einsatzgruppen role had been and what Ohlendorf subsequently executed had been and done and said about Eichmann the defendant now in the DA and this is Telford Taylor Taylor was a lawyer before and after his stint as chief prosecutor in Nuremberg and he covered the Eichmann trial as a journalist writing magazine articles and he took a very interesting position something that I think the memories have faded on he said we should be in Nuremberg in 1961 Adolf Eichmann should be on trial in Nuremberg yes by then it was West Germany but nothing had rescinded the London agreement the prospect a second international trial just required a lie descent even in these Cold War moment perhaps a little Kennedy Khrushchev consultation could bring the Russians back to Nuremberg and not only international accountability but perhaps Cold War progress could be accomplished by an Eichmann trial in Nuremberg which of course the Israelis had no interest in doing and the Russians I think were right with him and having no interest and the idea never got off the ground so Taylor covers the trial and brings his Nuremberg perspective to the Eichmann case I want to close with a few words about learning and commitment but really I want to bring this back to Jackson and I want to do this in two ways so remember Bill Jackson this is him at the London conference Jackson's son Jackson's executive assistant 26 year old lawyer he came back to the US after Nuremberg and had a very long and very accomplished career as a lawyer in private practice here in New York in 1961 he receives through a process I unfortunately can't really explain and preserves in his files this piece of daily transcript from the Eichmann case here we're zooming in and you can see that it's got a courtesy card from Shabtai Rosen who's Israel's ambassador at the United Nations and it's it off the son of Karl Eichmann vs. the Attorney General of the State of Israel and it's one day of the daily transcript from the Eichmann case sent maybe directly by Israel to build Jackson maybe by told for tailor to bill Jackson somebody is delivering this daily copy to bill Jackson who has marked and tabbed it all up and this is one page which he's paper clipped which is of course the page where part of the IMT record is being quoted in a subsequent Nuremberg trial and one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials is also being cited as Authority by whom by the Eichmann Court so for the person of bill Jackson as he's a partner at Milbank tweed and rising to become the managing partner of the firm back to Nuremberg the single biggest most meaningful legal project of his life is very much a connection into the Eichmann case in 1961 as frankly it would have been for his father Robert Jackson died in 1954 he was only sixty to heart disease then mystified everyone and and so time was short and it was regarded by Jackson as a good full run to have sixty-two years he came back in he had eight very distinguished years on the Supreme Court culminating really in Brown versus Board of Education and the next fall he died but in that last year of his life as somebody whose prowled through a lot of his archives he had an interesting correspondence with a person he didn't know a man I kid you not named Jefferson Davis this is late 1953 November 1953 and mr. Davis a person in California a stranger rights to Justice Jackson at the US Supreme Court and basically says you said at Nuremberg and you keep writing and saying in subsequent speeches and articles that the Nazis killed six million Jews there's no proof of that this could have been regarded as nut mail write neo-nazi garbage to be thrown in the circular file for whatever reason I think because of the force of the ire and his commitment to this topic Jackson dictates a fairly extensive reply to mr. Davis this is the first full paragraph on the first page of course it's not possible to give exact figures but I think the estimate is justified Hurdle of the nazi security service furnished evidence that Adolf Eichmann who had charged the extermination program told him about four million had been executed and two million in the east by the security service four plus two is six Jackson's dictating this in 1953 when he thinks Adolf Eichmann's been dead for eight years but the evidence of the crime that Eichmann had reported to his underlings that people like hurdle and visla sending in Ohlendorf had put in the evidentiary record is a very fresh fact at the tip of justice Jackson's tongue and he wants to tell mr. Davis what this is based on on the second page before his cordial Sincerely Yours he concludes with this paragraph and I think you can hear the edge under the polite and formal language when you say that my state and is not supported by the evidence it must be that you are not familiar with the transcript of the proceedings of evidence taken at the Nuremberg trial which is published in 42 volumes including these exhibits the original reports of many of these extermination projects or the translated documents published by this United States government in other words look it up and this is 1953 which is an achievement of 1945 1946 and forward under Telford Taylor and everyone who contributed to those endeavors and is a project that was picked up and continued and advanced significantly by the Israelis in 1960 and 1961 our ability to study our knowledge our responsibilities going forward our products of those Nuremberg Eichmann trials and the dedicated visionary leaders who chose that path rather than the brutal if briefly satisfying extermination Espace that would have been mirroring the conduct of the people who they instead subjected to the rule of law thank you we've been open this up to questions and the audience I'll bring the microphone to anybody who has a question two quick questions one what criteria was used to pick the first defendants and the second question was if they didn't have proof of death why didn't they try Ackman in absentia both good questions the criteria for picking defendants was who was in custody with one slight exception Martin Bormann was tried in absentia because it was believed that he was alive and a fugitive and that they were on his trail so the the hope was that they would catch him soon and because he was of such significant stature he was indicted and tried all the way through although we now know he died in Berlin in May of 1945 Boorman and the others the real people in the in the dock if you will were the leading surviving sector leaders of Nazism so Goering was the number two the reichsmarschall and Hess was number three and title was the head of the ver Mactan Ribbentrop was the foreign minister and Speer was the Minister of War production and funk was the head of the Reich spunk and Schacht was the economic minister and striker was the anti-semitic propagandist they were the celebrity I hate to put it that way but household name leading Nazi perpetrators and mostly they were up to their elbows in damning documents a few of them were weaker or more dubious cases and three of them as I mentioned were acquitted and why not try Eichmann in absentia it was believed he was dead every witness they interrogated said that he had committed suicide he denounced he was going to commit suicide and when he disappeared in May of 1945 it must have been that he did we now know that he was in a POWs camp in a false name and then got out and then you know sort of migrated around as a peasant farmer and then made his way down the ratline to Argentina but they they had no clue first of all thank you very much for a fascinating lecture this is a question slightly off-topic but I was wondering if you could shed some light on how was it that right after the war the the Jews that did survive who were displaced persons were not categorized as Jews but rather by the nationality of the country that they came from so you had this paradoxical situation where the Jews in from Germany Austria considered x-m enemy nationals did you have any insight into that I draw a line between the East and the West as to the Soviet sector in the East it was completely the Soviet mindset that the Nazi crimes had been fascist crimes against commas ours and that you know Jews or ethnicities were not a part of it this was generic extermination as to evil and so the interrogations evidence building everything that goes to what we would call the Holocaust the Russians really wanted no part of and that's why Amon and Brookhart and the American interrogation division is doing that pretrial work so there's a kind of mindset in the east which is D Judah I store religion free if you will and survivors are commissaries who survive the fascist evil in the West I think there's a range of insensitivities but pretty generally I would call it just insensitive obliviousness they sort of thought of people having originated in localities this was a territorial form of identifying where they were from and without really thinking much more deeply about why they had been targeted why they had been imprisoned why they had been forced least or south or north so it was about getting people back to as near as possible the territory from which they had originated of course for lots of Jews those were places where they weren't welcome places where they didn't want to go back places where their Judaism had been pre Nazi a problem if you will and they wanted to emigrate and this was a long hard complicated fight but a number of them heroically were able to get to Palestine who were the three that were acquitted and can you tell us how and why that happened happening at Nuremberg yes the three who were acquitted are shocked the economic Minister von papen a senior official in the foreign ministry and Phrygia who was a propagandist and that's a sort of slope from the least justified acquittal shocked to the most justified acquittal fridja shocked was somebody who had fallen out with Hitler so although he was a vital cog in the economic planning the breakout from the Versailles Treaty the military buildup and all kinds of internal German activity that then financed the military breakout 39 40 by 41 he'd broken with Hitler quit the party become a critic tried to emigrate and indeed finish the war as a prisoner in Dachau not in the worst of the barracks in Dachau in a kind of VIP house in Dachau but still he was liberated as a prisoner which for his defense attorney was a great fact and you know by a 2 to 2 vote it required three to convict and three to impose any sentence he was found not guilty and it was the American and the British judge were the two who voted to acquit there are of course Russian perspectives and others who said of course they were going to quit the capitalists but that was the one that stung Robert Jackson he thought that was quite an unjustified acquittal von papen was an elderly figure and I think his age was ultimately the mercy factor he was a figurehead and a distinguished gray-haired diplomat had been the ambassador in Turkey and then he was kind of out to pasture during the war years but he'd been Chancellor and Vice Chancellor and instrumental in bringing Hitler to power and very significant in the early 1930s but he got the senior citizen discount frische was a Russian prisoner captured after the war he was a third tier propagandist sort of Josef gurbles and then a level and then Fritchie and Russians didn't have many other captures to contribute to the would-be defendants but they were very proud that they had the arch-criminal frische and they kept calling him the arch criminal frische which led the other allies to basically go I don't know who he is but okay so they basically gave the Russians the indictment of Frisia he's brought to Nuremberg and he gets to meet his heroes in all these big Nazis it's like a kid with an autographed book and the other defendants almost to a man say who's fridja and frankly over the course of the trial the evidence kind of amounted to who's Fritchie and so that was an acquittal that I think the American British friends perspective was very comfortable with so those were the three and at the end of the judgement the convicted are brought back to the cellblock and the three of them are still sitting in the defendants box and one of them turns to an MP and says you know now what do we do and it's captured in a contemporaneous record so I won't f bomb you but the MP says to his wife I told them I don't give up what you do you know get out of here you've just been acquitted and they go to the door of the courthouse and they find a German mob ready to string them up so they come back in and they kind of asked for protective custody ultimately they're each prosecuted and each to serve a term through West German denazification court processes but they're acquitted by the International process too long an answer sorry many people a sort of alumni network of SS men people who kind of figured out who he was in these different POWs camp and farm communities and laboring in the north and got word first to his wife and his sons and then to some people with money to kind of provide for him and then to set up some papers and then ultimately the Catholic Church david says Ronnie's book becoming Eichmann is you know one of the the gold standard pieces of scholarship and it has a sort of long full account that would be more than I could say I don't I don't know of such a thing yeah yeah says Ronnie's book is very document based and very meticulous Betina standeth also is another meticulous scholar of Eichmann so I dressed on their accounts why wasn't Wernher von Braun and Albert Speer because their activities resulted in the deaths of thousands of people for example in the case of Wernher von Braun Waldo's British civilians and in the case of Albert Speer all the slave workers look you're half correct about von Braun of course not being prosecuted and becoming an American rocket pioneer and you know the Apollo program and so forth was the later chapter of his career he was not prosecuted and I can't quite score his culpability but there was certainly no understanding that he was a leading decision-making force in perpetrating bombings he was a scientist and a designer so his name is not a Nuremberg documents name he's a young rocket scientist but he's not anybody's potential defendant Albert Speer is a Nuremberg defendant he is in the dock there at the International Military Tribunal he is convicted the problem starts to be that he received a twenty-year sentence when his deputy fritz alkyl the client of Robert Surratt seus received a death sentence and went to the gallows and I think it's because Albert Speer did a very effective navigation through the evidence the luck of the draw was that he was the last defendant to put on his case so by the time he was up in June of 1946 he'd watched everybody else's strategy he'd been very cooperative contrite Baine visionary handsome young modern in all the interrogations including some by Jackson and he was very remorseful as he learned all the horrible things that had happened without his direct knowledge as he represented it so yes prisoner labor was keeping these underground factories going and he knew they were coming from camps but he didn't know what these camps were and these were selection processes that had exterminated three for every person who was then put on the labor side you know Sokol and others did that recent historiography has completely demolished Spears denials but the smoking gun documents were not found in the 1940s and so he was convicted he received a 20-year sentence he served it in Spandau he of course wrote the prison diary which was smuggled out on toilet paper which is an incredibly great book I mean he's a literary genius and then once he was out he wrote inside the Third Reich which was another international bestseller and a very important account of the inner circle experience during the 30s and the 40s personally I'm no fan of the death penalty on the note Robert Jackson wasn't either and I think maybe in the balance something in the end that counts for Spears benefit is what he did with those later years in giving history knowledge even if he was falsely minimized minimizing his own involvement and then he died basically three things though they're not related one is Mangala two is why was Rudolf Hess the last prisoner in Spandau when he wasn't even in Germany after July 41 and is the truth that German communists liberated Buckland ball instead of the Americans Mengele got away the growing understanding of who he was made him a high-interest fugitive and the Israelis believed they had him located in Argentina and so the Eichmann grab in one iteration of its design hope to get them both but the Eichmann process took a little bit longer and somehow they believe Mengele was tipped and he got out of the country and they had to use the plane and get Eichmann out so they gave up on Mengele and recent scholarship indicates that they continued to be debated but the Israeli government position was with Eichmann in hand and with security threats all around us today Mossad is better saving Israel today than doing a second operation to go after Mengele and so you know serious energy was not spent to try to replicate an Eichmann grab later of Mengele and he died of drowning natural causes in South America second question was Hess is you know maybe mad as a hatter and definitely in London during the war but before he's mad as a hatter at Hitler's right hand and an instrumental inner circle planner of internal German repression Nuremberg Laws political centralization and then military aggression he had this notion that the Duke of Hamilton and the Aryan people could sort of reach some armistice so he flew to Scotland and crashed and became a prisoner and he was found to be competent they were on I think the brink of finding him incompetent when he announced to the Nuremberg Court that he had been feigning amnesia that his craziness was an act that he was able to understand the charges and so forth so the tribunal said okay and then during the course of the trial he behaved like a nut he you know was reading children's books upside down he was rolling balls of dirt and skin and collecting all kinds of weird things in his cell he didn't really testify but he made a final statement that went off about eyes in the sky that were looking down on him so was he competent I'm dubious I think most people are he gets the life sentence and he serves it in Spandau until you know he's a very old man the British the French the Americans all tried very hard to get him paroled out but the Soviets would have nothing to do with it and it was a four-nation confinement and required unanimity so he was kept you know until the end I don't know that that I'll just plead non expertise okay I'll defer to experts on that professor a few years ago there was a book written called Hitler's willing executioner's and I'm sure you know it and effectively the hypothesis was that many of the normal Germans at day to day Germans were involved in the Holocaust machine so to speak and I would suspect during the 50s and 60s there were tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who were involved in the Holocaust machine that weren't prosecuted do you think the German government actually did enough to go after these people or do you think they were actually trying to protect them it's a huge and permanent question given the scale of the evil the crimes the victimhood nothing could ever be enough is my quick but maybe too facile answer but you're right and I'm I'm not sure one needs to choose between gold Hagen's thesis and the antithesis you know that a cabal of Nazis did it or that everybody did it you know it is some mixture of all of that or it's a pyramid which requires a base and you saw it in my photo of the Nuremberg rallies and you understand the rise to power we all do it's not a capture by a small group of people it is a supported patriotic galvanizing excited wave that Rises and Rises and Rises how much any individual knew about particular horrors is of course an individual issue and in the first generation this was an unspoken topic in the second generation it was an asked question by the children and a rebuffing by the parents and the grandparents refusing to answer in the third generation roughly my counterpart in Germany this has become their mission and their legacy and frankly I think of modern Germany as an unimaginable for the Nuremburg generation success story the judges and lawyers and scholars and city officials and museum curators and teachers the Jewish community small though it is in various spots all is dedicated to the teaching accountability Human Rights Project that was anti Nazism that was Nuremberg that was 60 years later finally possible in Germany and today Germany you know there's of course a minority that I'm not including in this compliment but Germany in the main regards the Nuremberg trials and the Nazi accountability as a success that they were part of and it made their future possible so you know whatever score one wants to give to the Hitler generations it should be you know very critical very damning high culpability but knowledge and roles varying enormous Lee individually but that's not today's Germany hi the microphone so I think it's commonly believed that the Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial kind of provided the theoretical or philosophical underpinnings for today's international criminal justice system and I'm wondering if you could share your thoughts on how the system today has sort of lived up to or failed those principles and and sort of what you see is the way forward in international criminal justice there's no question that the ad hoc tribunals of the 1990s and forward Yugoslavia Rwanda Sierra Leone Cambodia etc and the International Criminal Court a permanent institution our offspring late-in-life offspring 50 years old parents offs if you will of Nuremberg but they are the institutions that Nuremberg took a first step toward Nuremberg was possible in what compared to today's context maybe was an unduly easy moment there had just been a world war that the world had won and the question was what to do with the perpetrators Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany basically that the rest of the globe believes should be held accountable so in this sort of golden moment of 1945 until the Cold War sort of swamps it by the late 1940s the UN is created the Nuremberg trials the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the Genocide Convention the Geneva Conventions you know kind of international laws Golden Age because everybody was for it and believed that it was in their interests and would somehow reduce the chances of repeating what they've been through twice in the first and second world war today's international law context is of course not nearly that unanimity and the ICC is an institution that's 15 years old and has over a hundred States Parties that have brought it into existence but the United States and the Russian Federation and China and Israel you know the kind of footprint of States Parties is far from global coverage and it's a hard thing to bring criminal law processes to bear without the political military security power being behind it you can't prosecute parachute you can't parachute prosecutors into a war zone to you know try Assad you need to end the Syrian war and you need to control the land mass and then you need to gather the evidence and then you need to have an analysis that reaches a consensus about who's the perpetrator and then justice can commence so the sort of spots where the ICC or an ad hoc tribunal can go in are tough and rare spots Yugoslavia was one Rwanda was another each of those is a complex storybut successes were had and the ICC is I think a successful if young and still getting traction institution its chances will be better if an alignment moment occurs where the world decides that it is a tool to use in a particular context where there's a consensus I don't know when that will be professor you remarked how significant it was that after the war the Allies chose to prosecute the Nazi regime according to the rule of law instead of through vengeance or bloodthirstiness but the Nazis also operated meticulously according to the rule of law and as a professor of legal history I wonder if you would share your your thoughts on that it's almost like an evil twin of what you've been saying I'd be curious to know what you think well vast topic and a huge question but of course law is a label or rule of law as a label that anybody can claim and Nazi law and Nazi legalism is you know a very developed form that claimed to be law just like our Constitution or the London Agreement creating the IMT or the IMT judgment is a very developed form claiming to be the rule of law and then you sort of bring your critical faculties to assess the claim you know what does one think is intrinsic to the rule of law what constitutes fairness what constitutes notice what constitutes impartiality what constitutes independence which constitutes accountability and then is it present or is it completely absent under various of these systems the Justice case at Nuremberg one of the subsequent proceedings the altstadt er case quoted in the document that was sent to bill Jackson from the Eichmann trial is the prosecution of Nazi jurists and prosecutors who basically did trumped-up cases to kill political enemies of the state it's the trial that portrayed in the film judgment at Nuremburg which is a fabulous film and very true to that trial record so dressing something up in a robe or putting it in a courthouse I think doesn't answer the question it raises the question and it's and it's always a hard question I mean it's a question we should ask about our domestic courts and our international institutions and everything that we're a part of regularly and it's easy to kind of get swept up in the confidence and the partiality of your own project hopefully you can step back and assess it and hopefully you have adversaries who can call you on it and check it if you're straying away from the substance and simply becoming an empty form that claims the rule of law I I have no no qualms about you know blasting Nazi legalism as you know a charade and deeply offensive and absurd and in defending nuremberg not perfect by any means but as a fairly decent not rigged effort in very tough circumstances and there's a world of difference between those two we have time for one more question that puts the pressure on there is one do you believe that the criminalization of Holocaust denial is literally a roll back to the first Nuremberg rules I heard the first play the criminalization of Holocaust denial do you see that as as basically a roll back to the original Nuremberg rules I mean there's no suppression of free speech First Amendment well it doesn't compute by our domestic standards I mean you know clearly it violates First Amendment norms it's content-based regulation of speech and we don't do that that's our third rail a First Amendment law but it's consistent with continental traditions and other legal systems and you know I think it is debatable whether at some extreme point speech is not simply something to tolerate and combat with more speech robert jackson remember came back to the supreme court in the late 1940s and early 1950s and he's part of the Supreme Court in the review of the convictions of the Communist Party USA officials for basically speech and teaching and he's although he's got a concurring opinion that's a little bit his own straddle he's not completely off on the far end of the spectrum he casts a vote to affirm those convictions and generally I and I think a lot of people view that as a sad moment in his career and in American First Amendment law so you know content control and content fears shouldn't be indulged in very easily but at some outer extreme point which maybe we've never seen here but maybe is Nazism in the land where Nazism gave rise to Nazism is a different thing and at least maybe there's room for a national decision in Europe in Germany or in France or whatever to take its own path on that question because they have a different experience base than we do so I wouldn't want it here but I'm not a harsh critic of it there thank you all very much [Applause]

Channel: MuseumJewishHeritage LivingMemorialToTheHolocaust

Views: 15,963

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: Holocaust education, Museum of Jewish Heritage, A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, Operation Finale, Nuremberg Trial, Trial of Adolf Eichmann

Id: ZWAGkpnUMUk

Length: 76min 6sec (4566 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2017